The approach of night among the mountains is a melancholy sight; the shadows lengthen in the valleys, the sun withdraws, one by one, his rays from the darkening foliage, the silence deepens every minute.  You look behind you; the groups and clumps of trees assume colossal proportions; a blackbird at the summit of a tree bids farewell to the parting day, then silence covers all like a funeral pall.  You can only hear now the last year’s dead leaves crisping under foot, and far, far, away a waterfall filling the valley with its monotonous hum.  Bernard Hertzog began to pant a little; his clothes adhered to his skin with the running perspiration.  His legs were beginning to give hints of surrendering.

“Confound that foolish Mercury!” he cried.  “At this moment I ought to have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of smoking hot coffee, while I am winding up my chapter upon the ancient armoury at Nideck.  Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes, stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke my neck!  There!—­I said so!  Was that a tree I knocked against?  A hundred thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect, who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up!  I’ll lay any wager that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced and corroded bit of stone, without either nose or legs—­some shapeless deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal.  Oh, you architects! you architects!—­you are always finding antiquities everywhere.  Luckily I had not my spectacles on, or I should have smashed them against that tree; but now I shall be obliged to find a bed somewhere among the bushes.  What a road this is!—­nothing but ruts, and holes, and pits, and loose rocks and boulders!”

In one of those moments when the good man, getting exhausted, was stopping for breath, he thought he could hear the grating of a saw far down the valley.  What was his joy when he became certain that it was that!

“Heaven be praised!” he cried, plucking up his spirits; “now to push on with halting steps.  Now I shall get a little rest.  What a lesson this will be for me!  Providence had compassion upon my rheumatism.  What an old fool to go and expose myself to have to lie out in the woods at my time of life, to ruin my health and undermine my constitution!  I shall remember this!  Never shall I forget this warning!”

In a quarter of an hour the noise of falling water became more distinct; then a faint light broke through the trees.  Maitre Bernard then found himself at the top of the wood; he observed below the heath a stream running down the winding valley as far as he could see, and just before him the saw-mill, with its long dark posts and beams crossing and recrossing in the gloom like a huge spider.

He crossed the high-arched bridge over the rushing dam, and looked through the little window into the woodman’s hut.